Ghostwriting, of also so-called ghostwritten articles, is the designing of medical articles for promoting drugs and pharmaceutical products that involve fake studies. Senior doctors, inevitably very busy, have become willing to "author" papers endorsing new medicines that have been written by ghostwriters paid by drug companies. Large amounts of money may be exchanged.
Ghostwritten articles involve using planning companies whose job it is to design articles containing manipulated data to support a pharmaceutical product and then have these articles accepted by high-impact clinical journals, that is, the journals most likely to affect clinical decision making of doctors. Further, they supply doctors in clinical practice with free reprints of these manipulated articles. The Guardian found 250 companies engaged in this ghostwriting business. The final step in designing these articles for publication in the most prestigious journals is to recruit well recognized medical experts from prestigious institutions, to add their name to these articles. These recruited medical authors are either paid upon agreeing to add their name to these pre- written articles or they do so for the prestige of having their name on an article in a prestigious medical journal.
Experts in the field of medical publishing have done nothing to stop this abuse. Medical ethicists have lamented that because of this widespread practice “you can’t trust anything.”
Originally, ghostwriting was confined to medical journal supplements sponsored by the industry, but it can now be found in all the major journals in relevant fields. In some cases, it is alleged, the scientists named as authors will not have seen the raw data they are writing about – just tables compiled by company employees.
Ghostwriting has become widespread in such areas of medicine as cardiology and psychiatry, where drugs play a major role in treatment. Proven fraudulent “ghostwritten” articles sponsored by pharmaceutical giants have appeared regularly in top clinical journals, such as JAMA and New England Journal of Medicine—never to be removed despite proven scientific abuse and manipulation of data.
It has been estimated that 50% of the articles on drugs in the major journals across all areas of medicine are not written in a way that the average person in the street expects them to be authored.
Journals have devolved into information laundering operations for the pharmaceutical industry. (Richard Horton, editor Lancet, quoted in The Guardian, 6 Feb 2022)
Very few research psychiatrists do not have financial ties to drug companies that make anti-depressants.
Researchers serve as consultants to companies whose products they are studying, join advisory boards and speakers' bureaus, enter into patent and royalty arrangements, agree to be the listed authors of articles ghostwritten by interested companies, promote drugs and devices at company-sponsored symposiums, and allow themselves to be plied with expensive gifts and trips to luxurious settings. Many also have equity interest in the companies.
Some of us believe that the present system is approaching a high-class form of professional prostitution.
If clinical trials become a commercial venture in which self-interest overrules public interest and desire overrules science, then the social contract which allows research on human subjects in return for medical advances is broken.